


The One Thing Needful

by toboldlywrite



Category: Hard Times - Charles Dickens
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, F/F, I Don't Even Know, Starfleet Academy, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-19 00:11:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1448140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toboldlywrite/pseuds/toboldlywrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The (mis)adventures of Sissy Jupe and Louisa Gradgrind at Starfleet Academy and beyond.  A product of my recent livetweeting of Hard Times and my weakness for Kirk/Spock dynamics.  This may roughly follow the plot of Hard Times - I haven't quite decided yet.  Title taken from the first chapter of the book, because I couldn't decide on one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Thing Needful

The lecture hall was already full when Sissy Jupe burst in, her disorderly dark hair streaming behind her, clutching her book bag as if she were afraid it would fly off her shoulder. "Oh, dear," she moaned to herself. "Oh, dear, dear, dear." She couldn't see an open chair anywhere - but wait, there was one! In the very middle of the classroom, between two platinum blonde heads. Sissy took off, scurrying down the stairs and scooting along the row. "'Scuse me, 'scuse me," she muttered, face flushing at each indignant look from another student whose head she had knocked with her ungainly bag.

Finally she reached the empty seat. "Hey, is anyone sitting here?" she asked the girl next to her. (The other blonde head belonged to a boy who was deep in conversation with the two Orion girls in front of him.)

The girl turned to her. Her face was carefully blank, utterly composed, inimitably pale. Her eyes were ice-blue, and the points of her ears poked out from between waves of hair. A Vulcan, Sissy realized.

"No," she said calmly.

Sissy didn't hesitate another second before plopping down in the chair. "Awesome," she replied. "I'm Cecilia, by the way. Cecilia Jupe. Everyone calls me Sissy, though."

The girl regarded Sissy evenly. "Louisa," she said. "I would reciprocate with a last name, but I do not believe you could pronounce it."

Sissy nodded in what she liked to imagine was a sage fashion. "Oh yeah," she said. "I totally get it. I tried to say 'I eat blueberries' in Vulcan once, when I was about ten, but I ended up botching the pronunciation horribly and accidentally saying 'I'm a lesbian.'" She chuckled. "Freudian slip, but I wasn't to realize that for a few more years."

Right then, the instructor (an Andorian with the sharpest cheekbones Sissy had ever seen), clapped his hands. "Welcome to Interspecies Protocol," he said, his antennae waving.

Sissy leaned over to Louisa and whispered, "I'm excited for this class." Louisa didn't bother to reply.

~~~

As it turned out, Sissy and Louisa were in several other classes together, including astrophysics. Science had never exactly been Sissy’s best subject (which was why she was on command track – she did much better with people than with things).

One day, two weeks into the semester and right after their first test, which Sissy had failed spectacularly, she asked Louisa, “Is there any chance you could tutor me? Only I’d rather not fail the whole class,” she explained with a smile. Louisa had put her exam away quickly, but Sissy had clearly seen the perfect grade scrawled in red pen at the top.

“There is indeed a chance,” Louisa answered blandly, glancing at Sissy in what the latter now knew was her typical Vulcan fashion. “And I shall, if you like.”

Sissy grinned. “Thanks so much, Louisa. Say, do you have a class after this? Because I’m actually about to head out to lunch, and we could totally just grab lunch together.”

Louisa nodded as she hefted her backpack onto her shoulders. “That sounds agreeable.”

They made their way to the cafeteria and helped themselves to split pea soup and large chunks of crusty bread. Sissy wasn’t necessarily a fan of the cafeteria’s food (her neighbor Sleary back home made the best “thplit pea thoup,” as he lispingly called it, in the world), but she loved the floor-to-ceiling windows that let the light in and provided cadets with a fantastic view of San Francisco Bay.

“Isn’t the view wonderful?” she said to Louisa as they strolled by the windows, looking for one of those much-coveted two-person tables.

Louisa scrutinized the Bay, her eyebrow lifting. “It is aesthetically pleasing, yes.”

Sissy knew that was as much of an emotional response as she was likely to get from Louisa, but it still made her smile.

They managed to snag a two-person table. Sissy’s soup sloshed over the side of the bowl as she sat down. Louisa’s soup barely even quivered. After a few minutes of eating – Louisa in silence, Sissy unable to prevent slurping sounds that were still barely audible over the hubbub – Louisa set her spoon down and steepled her fingers. “So,” she began, “what is it you would like to know?”

Over the next hour, they worked through Sissy’s scarlet-striped exam. Sissy quickly realized that the problem with having Louisa as a tutor was that either Louisa was too smart to explain the concepts simply, or that Sissy was too unintelligent to understand even the most simple of astrophysical ideas. Still, she listened raptly to every precisely enunciated word Louisa had to say.

Just when Sissy was perhaps starting to maybe understand what a sidereal day was, Louisa glanced at her watch and set her pencil down. “I have a class in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I must go.”

“Oh, all right,” Sissy replied. “This has been tremendously helpful, though. When can we meet up again?”

“I have no time to go over my schedule at the moment,” Louisa said, “but here-“ she wrote something on the corner of Sissy’s test and pushed it at her – “is my number. We can set up a time later.”

Sissy smiled. “Sounds good.”

They were about to leave the cafeteria when three forebodingly tall Vulcan boys with identical short haircuts stepped in front of them.

“Hello, Halfling,” the middle one said, staring intently at Louisa. Sissy hadn’t spent much time around Vulcans, but she could swear there was a hint of scorn in his voice. She looked at Louisa, whose face was stony.

“If you will excuse me,” she said tightly as she tried to swerve around them. The one on the right blocked her, though.

“Tell me, Halfling,” he said, “did the Vulcan Science Academy not accept you? Did you cry at your interview?”

Louisa’s lips thinned almost imperceptibly. “Now why would I ever do that?” She added, “And you, Jindak, are one to talk about not being accepted to the Vulcan Science Academy.”

Jindak clearly didn’t take kindly to that. His face remained carefully blank as he shoved Louisa backwards.

Sissy made a protesting noise as she grabbed Louisa’s arm. “Don’t touch her, you son of a bitch!” she snapped at Jindak and the others.

Jindak and the other two Vulcans exchanged glances. “If we were emotional creatures,” the middle one said, “we would find that amusing, because it is not any one of us but Louisa who came from – as you so crassly called it – a bitch.”

Sissy wasn’t sure what they meant by that, but she was still ready to punch their lights out anyway. It took a lot to disturb her good nature, but on this occasion it was very disturbed. “Don’t you f-“ she began, advancing on them with her fist drawn back.

But she felt a hand around her arm, pulling her back. Louisa’s hand. “Sissy,” she said, her voice still level, “they are of no consequence. Leave them be.”

“Yeah, but-“ Sissy burst out indignantly.

Louisa gave her as stern a look as a Vulcan was ever likely to give. That shut Sissy up. Jindak and the other boys looked down their noses at Sissy and Louisa as they breezed past. The girls needed no further inducement to leave.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Sissy said quietly as they threaded their way through the crowds of cadets, “what the hell was that all about? Why’d they call you Halfling?”

Louisa’s face was still impassive as she explained, “My mother is human.”

“Ohh!” Sissy couldn’t believe she hadn’t put the pieces together before. “Wait, you mean like Commander Spock?” Spock, a legend at the academy and first officer to equally legendary Jim Kirk, was the son of Sarek and a human woman named Amanda Grayson. Until right then, he had been the only Vulcan-human Sissy knew about. (In light of what had just transpired, Sissy stopped herself from even thinking _half-Vulcan, half-human._ )

Louisa nodded. “Yes,” she said shortly. “Exactly like Commander Spock.”

“Ah.” Sissy was starting to understand now why Jindak and his cronies looked down on Louisa. “I’m sorry.” She paused, chewing her lip, as they left the cafeteria building and started across the Quad. “Aren’t you ever going to do something about them?” she said eventually.

“I see no reason for it,” Louisa replied, staring straight ahead. “I have no shame about my heritage.”

Sissy wasn’t sure she believed Louisa, but she decided just to let the subject drop.


End file.
